Barnes City
by Celty McMac
Summary: A collection of stories about the lives of a small cluster of Vampires as related by the different personalities of a young Malkavian, a Tremere Regent, and others.
1. Theo One

1. Theo One

Life sucks, and then you die. Then, if you're particularly unlucky (like me), you come back the following night and learn that you can never see your friends or family again, or the guys in charge'll take off your head or burn you alive.

Great stuff, huh? But wait! There's more!

You come to find out that the asshole who did this to you is crazy, something about an ancient curse dating back thousands of years. And, as a rule, when he does to you what he did, you yourself go insane.

Yeah, I know, I sound perfectly normal, but we'll get to that. I'm not irrational, I'm just not an "I" anymore, technically. I'm an "us." There's two other bitches floating around in my head, that have come along and made themselves manifest and take control of the body when they have something they need to say or do.  
I've gone to a shrink. He tells me that they're the incarnations of my innocence and my sense of self-preservation. This says to me, "yep, you're nuckin' futs." He respects that I don't want to tell him exactly what brought them along for the ride, though he gets the idea that it was a drastic tragedy (dying tends to be that way, methinks). He also says that it could be worse, some people don't get to have their sanity even one-third of the time. Yeah, doc, I guess, but I'm not much for optimism.

I've been friends with a professor who teaches night classes in some kind of literature or another at a college outside of the city since before the whole mess started. Older guy, really nice. Kind of eccentric. He's got this thing where he's constantly quoting from like every novel ever written ever, and though it's kind of irritating after a while, you learn a bit from it. He's also afflicted with my condition, so I've been sticking close to him. From what I've been told, he was at one point the ruler of Barnes City, and I don't mean he was the mayor. He actually owned the place and everyone in it, though most people didn't know it. I've been living with him for like forever. Well, no, six years or so.

His name is Steinbeck. Mine's Theo One, if I haven't said that already. It used to be Theodora back before I didn't have Theo Two and Theo Three to worry about. I couldn't convince them to choose other names; they can be stubborn like that.

Now, considering that the other two people in my head are really there, you can argue that my split personality stuff isn't a true madness, even though I'm sure it's in the books as being that. I just have to share my body with a pair of new consciousnesses, though I can reason perfectly well. Thing is, is that Two and Three aren't my only problem. I hallucinate. Constantly. And I get flashes of insight into other peoples lives. I have to concentrate, usually, but sometimes they come to me freely.

I can guess strangers' names with little to no problem, and sometimes I can get a glimpse of the thoughts on the surface of their minds.

Those aren't my only tricks. My senses are all more than perfect. I can make it so people don't ever notice that I'm near them, if I'm careful enough. The next best thing to invisibility, that. I can take a slug from a .44 magnum to the head and walk away from it. Granted, that sort of thing puts me in a bad mood, but hey. What doesn't kill you leaves you open for someone else to give it a go the next time, right?

Yeah, I know I'm all gloom'n'doom. That's just an aspect of my personality I'm having a hard time letting go of. I like to think that I'm better, now. I used to hate everything about my existence. I didn't take very good care of myself. Every mind-altering substance I could get my hands on, I used. Then I drove home afterwards. "Die young, make a pretty corpse," right? Right.

I'm a fucking _gorgeous _corpse.

Erk, see, did it again. Really, it's not so bad as most make it out to be. I've got quite a few friends that look out for me, and me, and me. Oh, and superpowers. Superpowers are the shit. The whole surviving off of the lifeblood of other people and the lack of sunshine are downers, yeah, but I'm enjoying life now that I'm dead.

I've said that already, haven't I?

Eh. No big deal. Moving on.

Barnes City. It's a great place, a melting pot of undead. Got everything from those people like us, Dr. Steinbeck and his sort (who do magic – it's fun to watch, and I'll have to tell you about the Sabbat pack that ran into his Floating Hand Grenades of Doom later), the Sabbat and their creepy cultist bullshit, and the Camarilla, who can't wrap their minds around the idea that Steinbeck doesn't want to be the primogen, nor does he want the chantry under their control. We have, he says, been doing well enough staying on the down-low on our own without an iron fist lashing out when someone fucks up and putting everyone on edge.

On account of the fact that he's got his own Clan, and the Brujah who hang out in their pool halls and the Nosferatu in the sewers ready to fight with him, the Camarilla learn to leave him alone when he wants to be. There's only those three clans in the city, and they're all Anarchs. The Camarilla don't want a war, they've already got the Sabbat to deal with.

Me, I don't really care either way. I'm just trying to get by. Suppose that makes me an Anarch, but I think that we (all my selves included) could survive no matter who's in charge. When the fighting started, we joined Steinbeck because he's our friend. That's what's important, isn't it? It was only one night's worth, and when it ended, we went back to enjoying unlife.

We'll get to that story later. 'Till then, we'll just babble on like I'm doing now.


	2. Theo Two

THEO TWO

She doesn't see the door. She doesn't _want _to see it. Sometimes, she gets a peek at what's on the other side, but she doesn't ever realize what she's seen. I like the door. I open it and stand in it. The Angry Lady doesn't want me to, she says that nothing good's on the other side and that we shouldn't look, but the Sad Lady just tells me to do what I want so I just look through and I tell her about what I saw.

The old man was on the other side once. He was sad, but not like the Sad Lady. When she's sad, you know it because she doesn't look like anything. The old man was crying. The Angry Lady was asleep, but it didn't make the old man happy. He just sat there looking at her and she kept sleeping and sometimes he would make a little noise, and the big guy was there and he was trying to help the old man stand up, but the old man wouldn't let him, so the big guy just waited.

The Sad Lady says that she only feels comfortable when the Angry Lady's asleep. I do, too. But why is the old man so sad about it? I don't know. Once, I looked in the door and the Angry Lady was sitting there and she was worried. I think that's why she's so mad all the time. She's worried about everything. I watched her and she was say-thinking _what am I going to do this time? How am I going to get them out of here? Dammit, I don't know how to win this one._

The Sad Lady doesn't know that the Angry Lady loves us. Mom used to say that you don't have to like the people you love, and the Sad Lady surely didn't like Mom. They always yelled at each other. I told them to stop, but they wouldn't. The Angry Lady was telling me to shut up. She likes it when they fight, she says that it makes the Sad Lady stronger. She just looks more sad to me, though. Sometimes, she would hurt us. I don't like it when she hurts us. Until I found the door, I couldn't do anything but say-think _stop, please stop_. Before the door came to me, I couldn't do anything good.

The Sad Lady gives me more attention now, she always asks me what I think about things. I tell her what the door showed me, because that's what she really wants to know. The Angry Lady just wants to use her sword on the bad guys. The Angry Lady likes her sword a lot. The old man gave it to her. I think the old man and the Angry Lady are good friends. The old man is nice to me, too. He gives me things like he gave the Angry Lady her sword. He gave me books. Good books. I read them all the time. The Sad Lady won't let me pick them up, but I've got them _here_. _Here_ is where I keep everything now. I can't feel the things I keep _here_, but they're _here_, anyway. And because I like the books I can read them.

The big guy is nice to me, too. He really likes the Sad Lady, and she likes him too, but she mostly thinks about the old man. The old man reminds her of Dad, she say-thinks all the time. He tells me stories. Better ones than Dad did before he left. I miss Dad, though.

I look in the door and it shows me about the big guy and the old man on the airplane. The big guy is on the seat playing music with his violin. He laughed once when I asked him to play me a song, and said something about how stereotypical it is, but I told him, no, I don't want to hear it on the stereo, I wanna hear _him _play. He laughed again, and he played me a song that was funny. On the airplane, he plays a sadder song than that one, and the old man gets mad because it hurts his ears, and he makes the violin hit the big guy until it breaks. I got scared because I thought the old man was hurting him, but the big guy just looked like he'd been jumped on, like when Mom would jump out of a room and tickle me. The old man smiled at him then, and they both laughed.

The door shows me about the ugly woman. She's mean to the old man, and he's mean back. They get in a fight and I yell at them to stop, like when the Sad Lady and Mom did, but they can't hear me or ignore me like Mom and the Sad Lady.

Sometimes I wish they would hear me more. They never know how to be happy.


End file.
